Semrush for Small B2B Teams: When Agency Access Makes More Sense Than Your Own Licence

Our Situation — Let Me Be Direct

We're a three-person B2B marketing team in OEM manufacturing. We handle everything — digital ads, content, CRM, social media, video production, exhibition planning, and SEO. We use HubSpot daily, Dealfront for visitor intelligence, Lusha for contact enrichment, and Adobe Creative Cloud for production.

We do not have our own Semrush licence.

We access Semrush through our digital agency partner — the team we work with on paid campaigns and SEO strategy. When we need keyword research, competitor analysis, or ad performance data, we work on it together with them. They have the licence, we have the context and the content.

That arrangement works well for us right now. But I want to be honest about why — because the answer is specific to our situation and might not apply to yours.

What Semrush Actually Does

Before getting into the access question, it's worth being clear about what Semrush is — because it's a broad platform that does a lot of different things, and most teams only use a fraction of it.

At its core, Semrush is a digital visibility platform. The features most relevant to B2B marketing teams fall into a few categories:

• Keyword research — finding what your target buyers are searching for, how competitive those terms are, and what content gaps exist in your niche
• Competitor analysis — understanding what keywords competitors rank for, what their ad spend looks like, and where they're getting backlinks
• Site audit — technical SEO health checks, crawl errors, page speed issues, and structured data problems
• Paid advertising research — analysing competitor ad copy, landing page strategies, and keyword targeting in Google Ads
• Backlink analysis — understanding your link profile and identifying opportunities to build authority
• Content marketing toolkit — topic research, SEO writing assistant, and content performance tracking

The full platform is genuinely powerful. The question is how much of that power your team actually needs week-to-week.

The Cost Reality for Small Teams

Semrush pricing is the first thing small teams hit. It's not cheap — and the cheapest plan has meaningful limitations.

For a small B2B team doing occasional SEO and ad research, $140-250 per month is a significant line item. The question to ask is simple: how many hours per month would you actually spend using it? If the answer is less than 5-10 hours, the cost per hour of use gets difficult to justify.

This is especially true for B2B manufacturing or industrial companies where the keyword volume is lower, the audience is narrow, and the content cadence is measured in weeks rather than days.

How Agency Access Works in Practice

Semrush offers agency plans that allow agencies to manage multiple client projects under one licence. Most established digital agencies that do paid search or SEO work will have one of these.

In our arrangement, this means:

• Our agency partner runs keyword research for our campaigns using their Semrush account
• We get the outputs — keyword lists, competitor analysis, ad copy insights — as part of our engagement
• For paid campaigns specifically, they use Semrush to monitor competitor ad activity and refine our targeting
• We can request specific research as needed rather than running it ourselves

The main limitation is speed. If I want a quick keyword check at 8pm on a Tuesday, I can't just log in and do it. I either wait until our next session with the agency, or I use a free tool for a rough check.

For our current workflow, that trade-off is acceptable. For a team doing daily SEO content production, it would not be.

When Agency Access Makes Sense

Semrush vs Surfer SEO — They're Not the Same Thing

One question that comes up for B2B content teams is whether Semrush and Surfer SEO are alternatives to each other. They're not — they serve different parts of the SEO workflow.

Semrush is a research and intelligence platform. It tells you what to target, what competitors are doing, and how your site performs technically. Surfer SEO is a content optimisation tool — it tells you how to write a specific article so it ranks for a specific keyword.

Most teams that take content seriously end up using both, with Semrush setting the strategy and Surfer executing it at the content level. You can read our full Surfer SEO review here if you're evaluating that side of the workflow.

What We Actually Use Semrush For

Through our agency partnership, the Semrush work we do falls into three areas:

Paid search campaigns. Before launching or adjusting a Google Ads campaign, our agency uses Semrush to analyse competitor ad strategies — what keywords they're bidding on, what their ad copy looks like, and where their landing pages are focused. This shapes our targeting and messaging.

Keyword strategy for content. When we're planning a content series or a new article focus, Semrush keyword data helps validate whether there's actual search volume behind a topic before we invest time in writing. This is particularly useful for industrial and manufacturing terms where intuition about search volume is often wrong.

Competitor monitoring. Our industry has a small number of serious competitors. Occasional Semrush analysis of their organic and paid visibility gives us a useful signal on where they're investing and where gaps might exist.

The Honest Verdict

Frequently Asked Questions